YouTube Seems to Be Cracking Down on a VPN-Powered Discount
YouTube Seems to Be Cracking Down on a VPN-Powered Discount
YouTube Premium fees vary by country, which motivated some folks to obscure their location
No, you see this is different from when google puts their headquarter in a different country to where they are working to pay less taxes because that’s … uh … just pay your 17 bucks and stop complaining.
Absolutely correct decision. YouTube is just so incredibly poor. They really need money guys. In fact, we should set up a donations page to support this great organization that totally respects its users and artists while being very strict against spam, dangerous misinformation and state funded propaganda! /s
True. In fact, anyone using an ad blocker is actually a thief, and anyone with a VPN is probably a criminal. /s
They are so poor and so small that they can't curate the content and ads, it's just too much with only billions of dollars of profit to work with.
That there are such wild variations in price between countries shows how little that subscription is correlated to any actual costs.
At best subscribers in richest countries are subsidizing poorer ones, but most probably, Google is just trying to maximize the amount of money they can extract from everyone's pocket. The repeated seemingly random price hikes seem to confirm this hypothesis. It's just the MBAs enforcing terminal stage capitalism and ruining everything that is good.
Not approving of any corporate behaviours here, but extracting the maximum price a market will bear has been the basis of pricing and supply/demand since such concepts existed which is at least 250 years.
Yeah, there's no real costs, because in this case it's a cost of "lost opportunity" in advertising.
As a rich westerner, your eyeballs are worth more than some rickshaw driver in deepest darkest India, because you have more money to fritter away on nonsense.
Never understood how the third world pricing logic holds up for things like video games, since the hardware to play them costs pretty much the same no matter where you are.
Never understood how the third world pricing logic holds up for things like video games, since the hardware to play them costs pretty much the same no matter where you are.
logistics and taxes also play a role
I thought this is so you don't get ads?
Where are you getting that from? YouTube premium is ad free (so far).
Generally an Unpopular opinion, but I think this should include creator ads (or at least an option per creator to support them by turning on their own ads).
Defaulted to off , I don't want to watch a random videos AG1 ad. That said there are a couple creators I watch I would be willing to enable theirs strictly to support them.
Because if I'm paying for ad removal it should be complete ad removal.
No. The only ads are the sponsors the creators have within the videos.
Didnt noticed it with smarttube https://smarttubeapp.github.io/ or https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular ;)
If anyone wants to keep going with this, try Google Play Gift Cards for said countries. You can pay for it via gift card balances, You can find them in key selling websites, or have someone you know in those countries buy gift cards.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It sounds like the jig is up for YouTube users who snagged cheaper Premium memberships by obscuring their location with virtual private networks (VPNs).
In the U.S., Google charges individual users $14 per month for YouTube Premium, which limits ads and offers a few additional features.
But that price varies widely across locales, and some Reddit users say they once managed to snag better deals by pretending to access the service from other countries, PCMag and TechCrunch reported.
Google charges the equivalent of $3 per month or less in places such as Argentina, India, Turkey, Ukraine, and the Philippines, according to Android Authority.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter, but the internet giant’s support staff reportedly told PCMag that YouTube recently started cancelling premium plans “for accounts identified as having falsified signup country information.” A YouTube Help page directs would-be subscribers to turn their VPN off if they get an error while signing up for Premium.
Google also recently escalated its crackdown on ad blockers by making YouTube videos unwatchable for users of services like AdBlock.
The original article contains 264 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 31%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
They just blocked a few of the main ones. I was able to sign up from Sri Lanka last week for ~$4/mo family plan. Might meet more investigating to see where works.
I could never get that to work anyway lol
It’s a game of whack a mole. In the past I’ve been able to get it to work in India, but now YT India blocks foreign payment cards. Was able to set up a monthly subscription in Ukraine recently using my foreign credit card. The taxes support the war effort I guess.
doesn't that first more in the end considering you have to pay for yt premium and a vpn? i fail to see how that would be a better option...
VPN plus cheap YouTube is probably less than YouTube. And VPN is useful for more than just YouTube.
You assume there is no other use for the VPN? And honestly, you can get a free trial of a VPN if you want to, to handle this, it doesn’t need a yearly re-up or anything, just when your card expires.
Why you would pay if i can watch youtube for free with Smarttube on Android TV, Tubular on Android, ublock in browser
paying for youtube
Tbh, that's pretty much the only thing Youtube did in the last few years that I can't really complain about. I despise their business tactics, but using your VPN to get regional prices just fucks it up for everyone. In first world countries, it's one or two hours of work. The same price in poor countries would be up to a monthly wage, that's why it costs them less. Abusing this will only end in most companies removing regional differences and blocking VPNs completely.
There are other methods to get the same functionality, use them instead of creating problems for others.
I get what you are saying, but I just can't get too upset about it in this case for some reason.